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I recently read about a way to swap people in different pictures from this blog.  If I had more time on my hands, I would have used that tutorial to create a picture of me and my babies.  For Mother's Day, I asked Mr. BAW to take a picture of me and the kids, including Toby, of course.  I knew it was going to be a big undertaking so I told Mr. BAW to just keep snapping away.   

So of the 12 pictures Mr. BAW took, we got one good picture below.  Toby was surprisingly consistent in all the pictures.  The worst offender was the toddler!  He squirmed, whined, and kept moving his hands.  You can see that I tried to restrain his hands in a few pictures to the left.  But in the end, I got my Mother's Day picture without having to do manual head swapping.  :-)

Baby girl is almost two months old now and she's accomplished quite a bit.  She can now lift her head up, laugh, and coo.  Her latest thing is to say "Ah-goo!" to Mr. BAW whenever he holds her.  So he's been calling her affectionately as Ahgoo.  I've also decided to nickname my toddler Buzz since he's obsessed with Buzz Lightyear.  I will use their nicknames Buzz and Ahgoo when I talk about my kids on this blog!

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Posted May 25, 2012


Folks like us who live on the West Coast were lucky enough to witness the annular solar eclipse on Sunday.  Although we didn't get to see the perfect eclipse where the moon's shadow passes right through the center of the Sun's disc in the sky, forming a bright ring, it was still a pretty spectacular event to experience.  Many people took to Griffith Observatory to observe the Sun, some bought fancy glasses and contraptions to view the eclipse.  We chose to view the eclipse using very basic tools, taking advantage of simple optical principles.  I used a hole puncher to punch a small hole in a piece of cardboard I pulled out of our recycle bin.  Light from the Sun passes through the pin hole which acts like a lense and creates and inverted image of the object.  In this case, we get a shadow of the solar eclipse as it is happening.  Oh, and you can create a similar image (not as sharp obviously) just by making little holes with your hands.   Yeah, our way of viewing the eclipse is not as nice as some of photos you'll see here, but it's also more fun and you get to learn some physics.  :-)  

Can you see the shadow of the solar eclipse? Kinda looks like a cresent moon.

My low-tech eclipse viewer.

An even lower-tech tool, my hands.  It creates multiple eclipses.
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Posted May 22, 2012



Aren't these socks adorable?  Yes, it is a rhinestone you're seeing on the socks!  They were gifts from my friend TNK.  Our two-year-old called them shoes when he saw them on his sister.  I corrected him and told him that they are socks.  He was not happy and insisted that they are shoes.  :-)
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Posted May 14, 2012


Happy Mother's Day to my two favorite mothers and to all the moms out there, including the animal moms.  A week ago, a mama bear was spotted with her two cubs in the backyard of an Altadena home.  The news coverage followed them all afernoon.  The bears were so adorable, the cubs tried their hardest to follow mama over a fence.  Thankfully, the authorities respected the bears and eventually mama bear took her babies back into the local mountain safely.

This is also my first Mother's Day as a mom of two!  So far things have been good.  I'm learning how to juggle between the needs of everyone in our family, including Toby's.  But the real test will be when I go back to work full time.  I'm already very nervous it, even though I have a few more months of maternity leave.  For now, I'll just try to enjoy my last newborn experience!




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Posted May 11, 2012


Ten years ago, a litter of Golden Retriever puppies was born in Riverside, California.  Two months later, one of the puppies came home with me and I named him Toby. I've never written down the story of Toby so I thought I'd briefly  document here, on Toby's 10th birthday.

Ten years ago, I was single, working full time, and finishing up my doctorate at UCLA.  I had moved out of a shared apartment near UCLA into a one-bedroom apartment.  It was the first time I lived alone.  I had actually gotten myself onto a waitlist for a pet-friendly apartment in anticipation of getting a dog.  Dog-friendly apartments are actually pretty hard to come-by in LA.  After months of waiting, an apartment in Brentwood finally became available so I grabbed it.  

Soon after, I searched the internet looking for Golden Retriever puppies to adopt.  It has always been a dream of mine to have a Golden Retriever, my favorite dog breed.  In my mind, I wanted a ball of fur, just a beautitul bundle of golden puff ball that I can cuddle and kiss!  I found  two breeders with litters ready for adoption.  However, one breeder was in Riverside, the other in Palmdale.  If you take a look at Google Maps, you'll see that there is a mountain chain between the two cities.  The breeder in Palmdale had great pictures of her puppies posted on the internet, the puppies were adorable!!  They were the puff balls I've always pictured.  The Riverside breeder did not post any pictures of the puppies, in fact, he only had one puppy left!  So I called both places to schedule appointments to see the puppies.  Unfortunately, the Palmdale breeder couldn't see me until late afternoon the Friday I wanted to book.  So I decided that I would go see the one puppy in Riverside first that day.  Since I was going to drive a long way to some stranger's house I didn't want to go alone.  Well, who would have time to go with me on a weekday besides my best grad school buddy?!  I managed to convince him to tag along even though he's a cat guy, clue number one.  

After two hours of driving, we arrived at the breeder's house in Riverside.  It was an old house with a large yard.  It was July so the temperature was in the high 80's!  I parked right in front of the house and as we walked up to the fence, two huge Golden Retrievers ran up to the gate from the backyard.  They actually startled me for a second because I didn't expect Golden Retrievers to be so big.  "Those must be the parents of the litter."  I thought to myself.  When we went into the house, the breeder said to us, "Let me go get the little monster."  I thought that was odd to because I was expecting a little puppy to run out excitedly if they hear someone new in the house.  I looked past the living room and saw the puppy still fast asleep on the floor in the kitchen, clue number two.  A minute later, after the breeder woke him up, the puppy walked into the living room, still groggy from his nap.  I took one look at him and was actually disappointed because this puppy was big.  He was not the puff ball I was hoping to get.  He was more like other puppies would be by three or four months old, but he was only two months old.  So I told the breeder that he should give me a discount for the puppy because he's already so big.  The breeder was asking for $500, I was hoping he'd knock off fifty to a hundred dollars.  But he refused, telling me that there is another person coming to see the puppy that afternoon.  Since I also have another breeder to see, I didn't want to forgo my dream of having a fluff ball puppy.  So we left without the puppy.  

We got back into my car and I started driving off.  I asked my friend if he was willing to drive all the way to Palmdale with me to see the other litter, expecting him to say yes.  Then he did something which completely surprised me.  He got angry and said to me, "Why would you want to drive all the across LA to see another puppy when there's a perfectly good puppy here.  Besides, he licked my toe!"  I've never seen my very passive friend so passionate about anything before so I was completely caught off guard.  Then, as if my friend had turned a light bulb on in my head, I decided that I had to have that puppy!  "He licked your toe??  Why didn't you tell me that earlier?!"  I yelled at my friend, as if it was his fault that I left without the puppy.  I quickly pulled over to the side of the road (we had only driven about a few blocks away) and frantically called the breeder to tell him that we were coming back to pick up the puppy.  A few minutes later, I had the puppy in the back seat, along with a few day's worth of dog food.  I was a little worried about the puppy being in the back seat by himself but my friend refused to sit with him in the back.  But turns out that I didn't have anything to worry about because the puppy slept all the way to my apartment, clue number three!

When we got back to my apartment, we excitedly brought the puppy in expecting to play with him all afternoon.  Instead, the puppy instinctively lay down on a towel I had put down for him in the living room and continued with his nap.  "Wow, your puppy is boring!" said my friend.  Yeah, the same guy who convinced me to get the puppy in the previous paragraph!  But I slowly discovered, through the years, that this laid back, nap-loving, bear-of-a-dog is the sweetest family dog a family can ever ask for.  Turns out that my cat-loving friend had helped me pick out a cat trapped in a giant dog's body.  This would explain Toby's love of sleep, fear of water, and disinterest in ball fetching.  

So that is the story of how Toby became my first baby and has been with me as I grow my family in the past 10 years!  Now Toby's life is filled with babies and surrounded by toys he can't play with.  But he seems to adjust to his new life very well.  Below are a couple of pictures of Toby and the babies (the little girl in the second picture is the daughter of our friend.)  Happy 10th birthday Toby, we love you so much!



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Posted May 8, 2012


Photo curtesy of Carlos Gotay Martinez/Flickr

May 5th is a special day in more ways than one.  Besides being Cinco De Mayo, this year we'll get to see the super full moon, the closest moon approach to Earth.  If you live on the west coast, the moon will be full at around 8:35pm.  Maybe we'll take a walk along the beach to view this full moon!  May 5th is also special to me because it's the day I defended my PhD thesis back in 2003!   Wow, I can't believe that it was almost 10 years ago.  You know what else happened 10 years ago?  I'll tell you in the next post. :-)
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Posted May 5, 2012


Our little girl celebrated her Full Moon last weekend.  In Chinese culture, baby's 1st month of life is very significant and is usually celebrated with a banquet.  We decided not to do so but we still had a few nice visits from friends and family to mark the occasion.  One special visit was from my friend TNK from San Francisco.  She is my close friend and knows that I am raising my children to be bilingual, English and Chinese.  So she gave us this set of Chinese wooden blocks!  How in the world did she ever thought of this or find it?  I would never have thought to even look for Chinese blocks!  We already have a set of wooden blocks by Uncle Goose, thanks to one of my little cousins.  But now, we have a Chinese set.  What a great way to learn some common Chinese characters, one side of the block has character strokes to teach you the proper way to write a character.  Even Mr. BAW can learn a word or two from the blocks! :-)  Thank you TNK for such a thoughtful gift.

As for Baby Girl, she's doing great.  Looking back at over two years ago when we were 1st time parents to a one-month-old, it's like day and night.  Baby Girl is so much more mellow than her older brother was at this age.  She is feeding regularly, sleeping extremely well, and is just a happy baby.  She nurses about every 3 hours at night so I get several good stretches of sleep.  Unlike her brother, she is not lactose intolerant and only occasionally gets gassy.  But even then, she gets over it pretty quickly.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this good behavior will continue.  Happy Baby Moon to our precious little dragon girl.  


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Posted May 2, 2012





























































































































































































































































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